Many fathers are actively involved in their children's lives and this has been shown to be important for improving children's outcomes.  Sometimes services that offer family support have found it difficult to know how best to support fathers.  

This evidence review commissioned by Dads Direct outlines what we know about how fathers influence children's outcomes, and best practice for engaging and supporting fathers in education, health and social care settings.  Detailed actions and strategies are provided for supporting change to practice. 

The Dads Direct is a consortium of service providing organisations including Parenting NI, Men's Health Forum, Family Mediation NI, HomeStart, SureStart (Banbridge, and South Armagh), Contact, and Relate.  The group receive funding from Big Lottery and Parenting NI will be running a series of training workshops over the next few months aimed at practitioners.  The  briefing paper can be downloaded below.  This piece follows on from a previous briefing paper which Helga wrote for the Man Matters project on Separated Fathers.  This can also be downloaded below. 

Young people who sexually offend are themselves individuals in need.  Their welfare, treatment and rehabilitation are important for their own well-being as well as for that of their potential victims.  Treatment should be age-appropriate and based on age appropriate assessment.  Although often recommended, psychological treatment for young people with sexually harmful behaviour is largely based on modified adult treatment programmes, whose efficacy with adolescents remains largely unproven.  

Outcome Imps is undertaking a systematic review of all the available evidence on the effectiveness of this approach with this particular client group.  It is a jointly registered Cochrane and Campbell Collaboration review.  This systematic review will provide policymakers and service providers with a summary of good quality evidence about how effective cognitive-behavioural interventions are with this group of young people.

Atlantic Philanthropies has invested heavily for more than a decade in prevention and early intervention services for children and young people across the island of Ireland.  

This review synthesizes the learning about how their commissioning efforts have tried to drive systems change by working with policy makers, capacity building, intermediary organisations and the academic community.  It also reflects on the experiences of more than 52 services funded under this initiative.